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Liberal Views Dominate Footlights

In Conflict is a docudrama about veterans of the war in Iraq.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

During this election season theatergoers in New York can see a dozen or so overtly political plays, about Iraq, Washington corruption, feminism or immigration; what they won’t see are any with a conservative perspective.

If you think the one-sidedness is a result of the city’s generous supply of liberals, then look west of the Alleghenies, where, from Pittsburgh to Des Moines, on down to Austin, Tex., and all the way back up to Ashland, Ore., the absence is just as noticeable. Artistic directors of regional theaters and playwriting programs throughout the country are quick to point out that most American plays avoid politics altogether or cannot be easily categorized.

Nonetheless, many have been struck by the lack of plays that, for instance, question multiculturalism, gay marriage and abortion rights, or champion an unfettered free market, a strong military and barriers to immigration. The problem, they say, is not that authors with those ideas cannot get their plays produced, but rather that they cannot be found.

Art Borreca, who has been the head of the Playwrights Workshop in Iowa since 1997, said he reads at least 100 new plays a year by students and applicants and had come across only one that had what could be considered a conservative viewpoint — and that was written by a liberal professor who thought his skepticism of multicultural courses was being unfairly characterized.

André Bishop, artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater for 16 years, said he reads about five plays a week, and from thousands over the years he could not think of a single one that would fall on the right end of the spectrum. “I’m trying to think if I ever read a play that I would call conservative,” he said, pausing a few moments. “I don’t think I’ve come across one.”

And at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, which embarked last year on an ambitious, decade-long project to commission 37 plays that depict moments of change in American history, the project’s director has been so unsuccessful in finding a play without a liberal slant that she even considered looking for a young writer at a conservative college to whom she could be a mentor over the next eight years.

“You cannot tell the story of the United States without including the story of conservative political and social movements,” said Alison Carey, whose wonderfully equivocal title at the project is director of American revolutions.

Not everyone is convinced that such theatrical voices are really so scarce. The playwright Jonathan Reynolds, who defines his politics as right of center, argues that being staged is more of a problem for writers who stray from the liberal line than artistic directors are willing to admit. He said it took 12 years to have his play “Stonewall Jackson’s House” produced, because no one would touch it.

Commenting on the failure of black leadership and political correctness, the play is about a contemporary black woman who asks a white couple to take her in as their slave. He said he remembered the initial reading at the Actors Studio in the mid-1980s with Elia Kazan and Norman Mailer. “Mailer said, ‘If you put this on, you’ll get lynched,’ ” Mr. Reynolds recalled.

It was finally produced in 1997 at the American Place Theater in New York. Peter Marks wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Reynolds had delivered a “rambling, funny, cranky and highly entertaining diatribe” against programs “especially of the liberal stripe.”

“Every single artistic director is of vaguely the same political stripe, either left of center or way left of center,” Mr. Reynolds said. He is seeking a producer for his newest play, “Girls in Trouble (Formerly Three Abortions),” which questions a woman’s absolute right to choose.

“It makes me angry and sad because it limits the theater’s effectiveness and relevance because it’s cutting out half the audience,” he added.

One place you might expect to find productions that champion traditional values is the network of Christian companies throughout the country. But even there, plays tend not to be overtly political. These theaters often present classics or works that contain uplifting messages and specific religious themes. Dale Savidge, founder of the Christians in Theater Arts, added that Christian artists span the political spectrum.

For example, the A.D. Players, a nonprofit Christian theater in Houston, has staged works by George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Horton Foote. It is currently showing a musical version of Robert Fulghum’s “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.”

Jeanette Clift George, the A.D. Players’ director, said she would like to see more plays that challenge the predominantly liberal popular culture. “I am appalled at the silence of the artist who is not in the mainstream,” she said. The right-leaning scripts that she does encounter tend to reflect their playwrights’ inexperience, she added. “I think there is a serious lack of mentors. I think the schools do not encourage a conservative statement.”

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Mr. Reynolds conceded that he could not think of many conservative plays, mentioning only David Mamet’s “Oleanna,” about a college student who, egged on by feminist groups, accuses her professor of sexual harassment. Other potential conservative playwrights, he suggested, may have given up.

Although Mr. Mamet wrote “Oleanna” years ago, it was only this March that he publicly declared in The Village Voice that he was no longer a liberal. Mr. Mamet is declining all interviews because he is writing, his press agent said.

In the essay he wrote that liberals tend to think that everything is wrong and must be corrected, but that his own experience showed him that despite humanity’s generally swinish behavior, people manage to get along reasonably well. “A free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism,” he wrote.

A similar conversation about the limited range of viewpoints has been going on in Britain since Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theater, said he would like to stage a “good, mischievous, right-wing play,” but was having trouble finding one.

“I would love to deliver a play that ended up in a position that, for instance, was highly skeptical about abortion rights,” he said. “I would like to see a play about the white working-class communities that were completely displaced by waves of immigration. These are the offensive plays we’re not doing.”

Just why a lack of conservative voices should characterize the theater more than other arts, like fiction writing, in which conservatives like Saul Bellow, Mark Helprin or V. S. Naipaul readily spring to mind, has puzzled artists.

Mr. Borreca, of the Playwrights Workshop, offered a historical perspective, explaining that the tradition of political playwriting in Europe and the United States really started with Bertolt Brecht, a Marxist, who remains a strong influence.

Ted Pappas, producing artistic director of the Pittsburgh Public Theater, reached back further, saying “the theater since ancient Greece has almost been a town hall meeting and an opportunity for more radical ideas to be revealed in front of a mass community.”

James Bundy, the dean of the Yale School of Drama, also sees theater as “a subversive art,” although he insists that nearly all labeling is misleading. “Most of my experience of playwrights is from reading their plays or seeing them, and it’s hard to divine their politics,” he said.

That raises the question of how to define a conservative play in the first place. After all, you can see politics in anything, and even playwrights who identify themselves as being on the left often don’t hesitate to lampoon liberal as well as conservative orthodoxies.

Forty miles east of Yale, at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., Martin Kettling, the literary manager, said he receives hundreds of new play submissions each year. While there were numerous political works with liberal takes on environmentalism, terrorism and the Bush administration in last year’s batch, Mr. Kettling said, “the vast majority of what I’m reading does not have a category.”

Still, for those who have actively sought to present a view from the right, they say they are presented with a problem that simply doesn’t exist on the left.

“I’ve never had a play come to me that I could say had a conservative perspective,” said Ms. Carey at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, adding that if anyone hears of a playwright with one in hand, “send him my way.”